


Blips on the Record

by ambivalentangst



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Flash Thompson Has a Backstory, Flash Thompson Redemption, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Identity Reveal, Non-Graphic Discussion of Physical Abuse, Non-Graphic Discussion of Substance Abuse, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker is a Good Bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23817754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentangst/pseuds/ambivalentangst
Summary: Flash, let it be known, doesn’tlikePeter. He’s too good at everything—infuriatingly so—and nobody ever calls him on his bullshit, like with AcaDec nationals. Flash has to put his all into everything he does for a fraction of the attention Peter gets for his bare minimum, and it pisses him off, to say the least, so sue him for looking for chances here and there to knock him down a peg.However, when henotices, he shuts his entire operation down.Maybe Peter has a decade on his age when he was in the thick of it, but Flash remembers what it was like. He gets having school be a safe place, and nobody, not even himself, is going to jeopardize that for Peter.//Flash Thompson’s story is not simple, Peter Parker can always use someone else in his corner, and secrets are had and protected by all.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Flash Thompson, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 182
Kudos: 1260
Collections: All Rereads All The Time, Finished111, Marvel, Peter Parker Slaps Severely, fluffy marvel fics (primarily irondad), my favorite marvel angst





	Blips on the Record

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bean_reads_fanfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bean_reads_fanfic/gifts).



> If you haven’t already, please go through the tags to be sure nothing about the content of this fic will be triggering or upsetting to you! 
> 
> In addition to those, I don’t believe the violence in this fic can be called graphic, but there is a fair amount of blood mentioned throughout it due to Peter’s usual Spider-Man shenanigans. If that makes you squeamish, you might want to skip this one!

Flash, let it be known, doesn’t _like_ Peter. He’s too good at everything—infuriatingly so—and nobody ever calls him on his bullshit, like with AcaDec nationals. Flash has to put his all into everything he does for a fraction of the attention Peter gets for his bare minimum, and it pisses him off, to say the least, so sue him for looking for chances here and there to knock him down a peg. **  
**

Flash is good at ribbing people, and when he does, people look at him. They even laugh, which is infinitely better than the cold stare he gets at home, going out on a limb to assume anyone’s there to hear what he has to say at all. Peter’s good at ignoring it, anyway, always lost in his own little world with Ned—fine by Flash, who cares less about legitimately bullying Peter and more about making other people like him—but when Flash _notices_ , he shuts the entire operation down.

Maybe Peter has a decade on Flash’s age when he was in the thick of it, but he’s never forgotten what it looks like—what it _felt_ like, and the realization is all but instantaneous.

Peter comes into physics late one day, feet dragging, and as he turns to take a seat, Flash catches sight of the purple mark smeared sloppily across his eye. His stomach clenches, and something cold runs up his spine because kids smart enough for Midtown don’t get hurt like that. Furthermore, kids who smile like Peter—even with his worn shoes and threadbare sweaters— _definitely_ don’t.

(Flash knows better than anyone that money, or even lack of, doesn’t mean anything as far as safety goes.)

Flash’s hand clenches around his pencil, the lead snapping as he tries to think of an innocent explanation for why and how Peter could’ve possibly gotten busted up like that. His effort fails when Ned, sitting next to him, pokes his arm as Peter struggles to get his things out, and he jumps about a foot into the air.

Flash’s eyes narrow, and when he takes the bathroom pass, he slides down the stall wall to tell himself that his mom doesn’t live with him anymore—that it’s over. _For him, maybe_ , he thinks. Not for Peter, who Flash suddenly sees startle when Ned and MJ’s jokes turn to playful shoves, when Mr. Harrington claps him on the shoulder after an especially good practice.

The next time someone makes a _Penis Parker_ joke—not even really one of Flash’s finer inventions, though it is catchy—he levels them with a glare that could kill, learned from his dad after Flash does something stupid.

“Old meme, dude.”

Needless to say, Flash has had plenty of opportunities to learn the craft, as much as he might sell himself short, and anyone watching is impressed and more than a little taken back by just how threatening a kid who’s the self-appointed president of the official Spider-Man Fan Club™ makes three words—two of which are slang—sound.

Flash might be an asshole, but he gets having school be a safe place and is more than willing to give whoever tries to change that hell.

Now that Flash is watching Peter—and he is, calculating and logging injuries carefully in his head—it’s plain to him that he’s got something going on. If the incident in physics was a one-off thing, he’d let it drop, but Peter’s always wincing, hiding all sorts of bruises that Flash catches glimpses of when the P.E. uniform he’s outgrown but not replaced rides up.

Peter’s an open book as long as you take the time to read him, Flash finds, and as such, he musters up the courage to face Coach Wilson one day. 

“I heard Peter cough up, like, the state of New York in the locker room,” he whines, even though Peter did nothing of the sort. “If he plays and touches the ball, everyone else could get sick, and I won’t be able to compete in chess regionals this weekend.” The bit about having regionals is true, but Flash is bullshitting his way through the conversation. Anything to get Peter benched, give him a second to rest—Flash _sees_ his fluttering eyelids, him swaying on his feet—and more importantly, keep anyone from bumping into him and the ugly bruise exposed by his t-shirt.

Wilson eyes him warily, ready to call him on his admittedly terrible argument, so Flash pulls his trump card. “My dad cleared his schedule to make it.” That’s even less true than Peter being sick. Flash’s dad hasn’t come to any of his extracurricular events since second grade, when his mom had been out of rehab for three months and he’d had ample time to bury the guilt from what had happened in paperwork for his next case. “Do you know how much his annual donation is?”

Flash might be fudging the details, but Peter does look like death warmed over, and Wilson obviously sees it when he glances his way. Nonetheless, he gives Flash a long look that screams what he’s been called as long as he can remember— _brat_ —but finally gives in. “Parker!” he yells from across the gym. “You’re walking laps today—uneven teams.”

Peter listens, and Flash pretends not to notice him staring at him like he’s grown a third head.

(Flash has had plenty of sleepless nights of his own, terrified that he’d be shaken awake by a manicured hand hopped up beyond reason.)

It never occurs to him to think about how Peter overheard the conversation from the other side of the gym.

(Why would it, when everything about the situation is so glaringly transparent to him?)

Three weeks later, when Flash is running attendance to the office for a sub, he sees Peter make a beeline for a janitor’s closet, slamming the door behind him so hard it rattles in its hinges. He glances to the sheet in his hand and curses, fully preparing himself to be brushed off the second Peter catches sight of him. Instead, he opens the door to find him sandwiched between the mop bucket and the wall, hands buried in and tugging at his hair.

It’s familiar, which is bad because he remembers his hiding place of choice—under the guest bed—and the smell of dust there, the wooden beams above his head that he focused on until the world stopped swaying, but it’s also good because he knows what to do.

 _Okay,_ Flash thinks, bolstering himself. _Panic attack. I can do that._

The door swings shut behind him, and he crouches down. “Hey, Parker, what’s up?” he tries, pretending everything’s casual.

Peter doesn’t look up from where he’s got his head pressed between his knees.

“Okay, cool, cool.” Flash pauses, wondering just how stupid he’s going to look if he actually does what’s on his mind. He goes for it anyway. “Take a breath and hold it. Five seconds in and out. Got that?”

This time, Peter shakes his head. “Can’t breathe,” he croaks. 

“You can,” Flash assures him.

His dad might not have wanted to touch the whole thing with a ten-foot pole, but he hired someone good to do that for him. Flash knows how this goes.

“Here, you can hear me, right?”

A nod, jerky and short, more of a bobble, honestly.

“Cool, that’s—okay. So follow me.” He breathes in, deep and exaggerated, and hears Peter do the same. He guides him through it a few times, and then he keeps moving. “So keep doing the breaths, but name five things you can see.” His therapist was a big fan of the activity, called it grounding, and it’s an oddly intimate thing to be showing to Peter Parker, of all people. Nonetheless, Flash pushes past his own discomfort and through the pause created as Peter considers his instructions. “Number one,” he prompts, and for the first time since he walked in, Peter lifts his head.

“You,” he manages, followed by silence as he takes another breath. Flash holds up a finger to help him keep track but doesn’t have to push him to keep going. “The door,” he does next, and the third and fourth come faster. “The broom. Windex.” He sounds less shaky as he goes on, and Flash is glad. “The floor.”

“Nice. Okay, now four things you can hear.” He tries to seem confident, even though it’s been a few years since he’s done it, and the order is a little fuzzy in his head.

Peter nods. “The class next door. Somebody walking. Something dripping.” Those are normal enough, reaching Flash too. He’s expecting the last to be him tapping his foot, maybe even his breathing. Instead, Peter grips his arms tight and lists the lights.

Flash furrows his brow. “What?” he asks, unable to help himself, and there’s a second where Peter looks like a deer caught in the headlights, tense and seemingly surprised by his admission.

“You know—the lights. They buzz. I have—uh—good hearing and it’s kind of—”

“Whatever.” Flash remembers how _loud_ the world can get, normal sounds becoming bellows, every touch like sandpaper on his skin. He doesn’t want to overanalyze it, not when he already feels like as soon as Peter gets back to his senses, he’s going to kick him to the curb. Maybe not that meanly, sure, but still. “Three things you can touch.”

Was it supposed to be four things you can touch and three you can hear? Probably, but it’s too late now. Regardless, Peter’s breathing is evening out bit by bit, and his hands fumble around the space, landing on a bucket, which he promptly names along with his shirt.

“Mr. Stark got me this one,” he mumbles, and at the admission, Flash looks down to find a bad joke about AIs printed on his front. “He—he has this AI, and she’s cool—so he—he bought me—”

“Last thing you can touch.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—okay—um—”

His hand pats the floor clumsily, clenching and unfurling all over again as it does so. “The ground. Ha—the ground is grounding. Haha.” He actually says the _ha_ s, not to mention follows things up with an actual laugh, weak as it is, and Flash can’t help his response.

_“Dude.”_

“Sorry.” He looks up, running his fingers back through his hair and tearing through a snag he finds. Flash wonders if doing so hurts. He’s rambling, tripping over his own words, and while there’s light in his eyes, it’s frenetic, winking desperately in the poor lighting of the closet. “Do you know the rate of survival for initial building collapse? Cause it’s not good. Chem—you know, there’s a lot of weird things—smells—from the experiment we’re doing right now. Little bit gross, but it’s—”

He shudders, words failing him. Flash doesn’t know if the sudden stream of talking is better or worse than silence and his face buried in his lap. It’s all nonsense as far as he knows, but triggers are weird.

“Hey, it’s—it’s cool. Do you want to, like, keep going with the thing I’m doing, or—”

“Please,” Peter whispers, gulping. “I’m, like, almost good. Just—a little more would be nice.”

“Alright—just, focus on your breathing, okay? I’m really not gonna’ know how to help if you pass out.”

Peter doesn’t say anything to that, but Flash earns himself another watery laugh.

“Two things you can smell,” he urges him, and Peter sucks in a rattling breath.

“Soap. Sweat.”

Flash’s nose wrinkles. “Me sweat or you sweat?”

“Both, I think. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” His hands are still grappling with his head but are slowly, cautiously loosening. Flash considers that progress. “There—is there anything else?”

His breaths are finally evening out too, and Flash feels something in his chest ease. “Uh—yeah, yeah, just—uh—one thing you can taste,” he finishes, biting his lip and looking over his shoulder. He can’t see anything past the wooden door, but it’s a force of habit. 

People can be quiet when they want to be, and Flash hates being taken off guard.

Peter tips his head back a little, staring up and into the fluorescent on the ceiling. Flash thinks that would hurt his eyes, but if it’s uncomfortable, Peter doesn’t say, smacking his lips together once, twice. “Chicken nuggets,” he declares after some deliberation. “My aunt packed me the Lunchable kind, and, like, objectively they’re pretty gross, but it’s the nostalgia, you know?”  
  


Flash does know, as a matter of fact. “The pizza ones are better,” he says stupidly, but Peter doesn’t seem mad. Instead, he laughs, and the attendance sheet feels like a dumbbell in Flash’s hand. His hands have released his hair, and now they’re just splayed on the ground in a five-pointed star. The tension in the position is clear, but it seems to be working for him, so whatever. Flash shifts on his feet. “If you’re good, I should probably be headed back to class,” he says lamely.

Peter doesn’t say anything, still staring into the light.

Flash bites his lip a little. “So, are you good?”

“Why’d you convince Wilson to make me sit out?”

Ah. _Shit._

He’s been exposed, and he has no time to explain the reason why he’s been watching Peter like a hawk ever since he put the pieces together. He decides to play it cool, shrugging. “You were sick. I wasn’t about to get a cold or some shit and not be able to compete.”

Peter’s brow furrows, and his head drops back down to squint at Flash. “But I wasn’t—”

“Super sick. It was seriously nasty, man.” He edges towards the door, confident that Peter, though mostly recovered, isn’t going to be getting to his feet soon enough to catch him. His hand comes down on the handle, pushing it so that a sliver of light from the hall filters into the closet, and he knows he shouldn’t, knows it isn’t his place, but he’s this close—what if he doesn’t get another chance to tell him? “But—uh—if you ever need a place to stay if things are rough, you know where my house is. I get it.”

And he does.

Flash hosted an AcaDec meeting last year because the school flooded on the day they were supposed to practice, and it’s not like his dad is going to be home to ask who it is he’s inviting over, though if he saw Peter, he’d probably paste on one of the tight smiles that mean he doesn’t approve but isn’t willing to cause a scene.

Flash’s dad is picky about public image, and Peter looks the part of a scholarship kid, which Flash knows is an asshole thing to say, but that’s his brand anyway, so what-the-hell- _ever._

He can see the confusion the comment casts over Peter’s face, but he’s gone and back on track to the office before he can ask any questions. 

If the sub notices that the attendance run takes ten minutes longer than it should, he doesn’t look up from his sudoku as Flash slides back into his seat.

From there, Flash keeps an ear out for a knock at his door, but at school, he does what he can to make things _easier._ He knows it’s not simple, that as much as he would like to bust into Peter’s place and find who the hell is making him flinch at tiny things going awry, he doesn’t technically have proof, and if he doesn’t do things right, that could leave Peter with someone pissed that anyone even suspects.

His mom was more random than systematic, her outbursts timed around fixes and withdrawals, but it’s a topic he takes seriously.

(No one thought the kid that got picked up in a car worth half as much as the school building itself could have it that bad, and false appearances are a recurring problem with these things.)

He’s done his research, prepared himself for a potential round two, but it’s not his own back that ends up needing to be watched.

Peter keeps showing up with bags under his eyes, so Flash angles himself to hide him from his teacher’s line of sight and makes a copy of his notes for him when he dozes off in class. Peter has bruises, almost always yellowed, but bruises nonetheless, poking out where his clothes ride up, so Flash enlists his older sister—already out of the house by the time his mom started spiraling—to pick out some expensive concealer that he puts in his pencil case when he’s not looking. Peter jumps at little things—the creaking of the walls on windy days, people passing behind him in class—so Flash makes sure he moves deliberately around him, ignoring the looks Peter shoots his way the whole time.

And almost a month and a half after the incident in the janitor’s closet, Spider-Man crashes through Flash’s open window and onto his bedroom floor.

Flash screams, and the pitch of the sound would be embarrassing if Spider-Man didn’t look like he’d been through absolute hell. His suit is filthy, the smell of smoke drifts off him in waves, but Flash’s most pressing concern is the groan he makes as he clutches his stomach because—

Holy _shit_ that’s a lot of blood, and Flash is glad he’s at least bleeding over his rug instead of the carpet, the former being much less expensive to replace to be sure the maid doesn’t snitch to his dad.

“ _Spider-Man?_ ” he breathes, incredulous, and Spider-Man lets out a sigh that almost sounds irritated, mumbling something fast under his breath— _“I told you, I’m_ getting _help, Karen.”_ —before he speaks and reaches up, ripping his mask off his head with a cough and the exposure of dirty, rumpled curls.

“We can skip the superhero name,” Peter goddamn Parker says, looking up with ash on his brow and pain in his eyes.

 _“What the fuck?”_ Flash exclaims.

Peter raises a tired brow. “Look, were you joking when you said I could come to you? Because my AI is getting really— _shit_ —” he sucks in a sharp breath as he tries to shift, “—pushy about me getting fixed up soon, and I’d prefer not to involve Mr. Stark in this one.”

 _“What?_ No—I—you’re _Spider-Man?”_

Peter has what looks like a pretty serious stab wound, which would make sense, considering he’s _Spider-Man_ , except that definitely does _not_ make sense, there is no world, no _universe_ where that makes sense. Peter Parker is suffering major blood loss on his rug, in his house, and seriously, what the _fuck?_

“Yes?” Peter has the audacity to look exasperated with _him_ , but Flash can scarcely take his eyes off the blood coating the claw of a hand he has pressed over his wound. “You already knew that?”

There’s so much blood—that’s bad, shit, that’s _bad_ —but trust that all it would take is being annoyed by Peter to move Flash to action. He scrambles off his bed and over his physics homework, thinking of where the closest pain meds and a needle and thread would be because a band-aid isn’t going to be able to fix this one, not like ring-laden fingers cresting his cheekbone in a slap or the half-moon bite of acrylics in his arm.

The words, thoughtless and panicked, erupt from him as he heads to search, moving as fast as his legs—suddenly comprised of all the integrity of gelatin—will take him.

“I thought you were being _abused_ , Parker, not Spider-Man!” he yells, shrill, and then, like fleeing from the janitor’s closet, he’s off like a shot down the hall.

Faintly, he can hear cussing, but Flash doesn’t care, not right now. He comes back with a big ass bottle of Advil and the sewing kit he had to dig to find because there’s not a lot of need to bother fixing anything when he or his dad can just buy something new.

Regardless, he crouches down by Peter, who has somehow crawled out of his suit—his _spider suit_ —in the time it took him to get supplies, which has left him in his boxers. “Do you know how to do this?” he asks, and Peter thankfully nods, which is good because Flash thinks he might hurl if he has to figure out how to do stitches on the go. Peter takes the kit from him, and his fingers are _slathered_ in red, but their actions are methodical as he threads the needle and presses the point to his skin, sucking in a measured breath as he begins to work.

It’s horrible to watch, but Flash can’t tear his eyes away.

A thousand thoughts whirl across his mind— _what happened, why the soot, how is he fucking_ Spider-Man—but the one that comes out on top is less coherent and more of a feeling: deep, deep embarrassment.

He spent all that time watching his back, thinking there was someone who understood him, only for him to be completely off-target. Angry, fitful shame reaches up the back of his throat, stronger than he’s felt in years—not since before therapy.

(It’s not so common, after all. He was just a scared, stupid little boy who thought his mom was just mad, thought it would all be better sooner rather than later, thought—)

“Hey, Flash?” Peter’s nearly done with his stitches, which are simultaneously gory and neat, and he doesn’t look up.

“Yeah?” he says and is horrified to hear his voice come out in a crack.

“Can you get a washcloth? I’m, like, _really_ gross.”

Flash nods wordlessly, and the cold water seeping through the fabric onto his fingers feels like a taunt. He wrings the rag out in the sink and brings it back to Peter, feeling something hot and cold all at once toss in his stomach. Peter’s not stupid—the furthest thing from it, in fact—so he’s going to realize there’s a reason he thought it was abuse. He’s going to put it together, and Flash is going to have to deal with someone other than his family or his therapist knowing what happened.

He sits with his legs crossed on his bed in trepidation, wanting nothing more than to run as fast as he can from the scene, but Peter’s still hurt. He can’t just leave him, and he especially can’t leave him without doing something about the rug.

So he sits—waits. And when Peter finishes, he realizes it’s kind of weird for him to be next to naked, so he grabs him a shirt he got that’s too big on him but hasn’t returned yet—Peter’s built under the baggy flannels and sweatshirts he tends to wear. He follows that up with a pair of joggers.

“Here,” Flash mumbles, tossing them his way.

Out of the corner of his eye, Flash sees his physics work still open on the bed. Bitterly, he thinks that Peter probably has it done by now. Of course he does, of course he’s a superhero, not some dumb kid with a mom who had too much money and alone time for her own good.

Peter gets dressed, and then it’s the two of them in Flash’s too-big house, both of them pretending not to notice the iron tang to the air.

Flash stares at the floor, his hands balled into fists.

Peter breaks the silence, tentative, awkward in that constant way of his even though he’s always the smartest person in the room. “Thanks,” he offers.

The word sits heavy in the space between them.

“Glad I could help,” Flash replies, most of the emotion gone out of his voice. “So, Spider-Man, huh?”

Peter shrugs, and when Flash finally lifts his eyes enough to look at him, he sees that he’s leaning back on the wall, a hand still over the stab wound. “You—uh—you really didn’t know?”

Flash shakes his head, and Peter laughs thinly. “Mr. Stark is gonna’ get a kick out of this,” he admits. “This is, like, the third time somebody’s figured it out because I’m a dumbass.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah—damn.”

The urgency of the situation has evaporated, leaving thick silence in its wake, but that just leaves Flash mapping escape routes, bracing for the inevitable. And then—

“Are you okay, dude?”

He hates this. “I’m fine,” he lies. “What about you? Where were you tonight? A house fire?”

“It was an apartment, actually, but, look, man, that day in the closet, you said—”

“I _know_ what I said, Parker. It’s none of your business.” 

Flash never talks about it, not ever, and he despises the tightness to his throat. He thought he was past this—he even stopped going to therapy a few years back as the rest of his life picked up—but this is picking at a scab, just as painful as he’d thought he’d forgotten.

Peter sits up, way too much concern brewing in his dark eyes. “But if your parents—”

“It’s not my _parents_. It was my mom, and she doesn’t live with me and my dad anymore. It was a long time ago, anyway. Drop it.”

“But—”

_“Drop. It.”_

Flash strides forward, needing something to do other than dodge Peter’s questions and see the pity on his face. Peter’s the one who got _stabbed_. He shouldn’t be worried about him, but the universe seems to be giving Flash a giant middle finger for no reason he can discern.

“Get off the rug,” he directs, and Peter shifts with a few grunts and sharp breaths until Flash can roll it up and shove it under his arm. “See you at school,” he mutters before he walks back into the hall.

(He sleeps in one of the guest bedrooms that night, and come morning, Peter is gone, leaving the physics problems finished in his place.)

In retrospect, it makes sense, Flash supposes. The bruises are a given, for one. Always having to be prepared for a fight is its own kind of paranoia, and if he’s up being Spider-Man all night, he probably doesn’t have the energy to make it through history awake, which is a tribulation of a class on the best of days.

Flash is something of a Spider-Man fan, but with the humiliation of how he found out Peter’s identity burning bright in his memory, he can’t quite look at him the same way. He hasn’t told anybody—he’s not _that_ big of an asshole—but it still sucks to know someone’s walking around with his big fucking bowl of childhood trauma they could blab about and shatter.

And yet Flash can’t bring himself to stop.

He keeps printing extra notes and moving slowly. He even, on one memorable occasion, saw Peter fidgeting on his phone while sirens blared somewhere outside school and raised his hand to tell the teacher that Peter was going to the nurse.

Flash would, frankly, rather curl up in a ball and die than talk to Peter about what he knows about him, but Spider-Man still has people to save, alright?

The day he makes an excuse for him, Peter appears in his room for the second time, except Flash isn’t there to see it. Rather, he _hears_ it, downstairs and listening to a lecture from his dad about an A-minus on a psych test.

“This is ridiculous, Eugene. You’re smart, so _act_ like it. You’re my son, and I won’t have—”

_Crash._

Actually, _crash_ is an oversimplification. It’s more like _tumblebangthudgroan_ , but hey, details.

His dad pauses, looking around, and Flash is forced to think fast. At that point, he doesn’t _technically_ know it’s Peter, but he never came back to class. He’s been thinking of him, and more importantly, he cannot risk his dad finding Spider-Man bleeding out post-patrol in his bedroom.

“Probably some textbooks. I left them on the edge of my bed,” he offers quickly, and it’s a lucky thing his dad has plenty of grievances he loves to give voice to.

“This is just another example of you being _irresponsible_ —” he begins again, and by the time Flash is set free—only because his dad has a dinner with a client to get to, make no mistake—he bounds up the stairs two at a time to find Peter with the sewing kit in hand. Flash never did end up putting it away, and he told the maid, Cynthia, a while back not to clean his room.

He’s trying to thread the needle like he did last time, but instead of the sure, experienced motions from then, his hands are trembling so fast they’re nearly blurring and are made even more unsteady by the hitching of his shoulders as he sobs.

Flash freezes in the doorway. He doesn’t know what to do, how to react, and then he watches the string slip free of the needle and a particularly loud keen leave Peter’s lips, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Well, there’s a place to start.

He walks in, closing the door behind him just in case his dad comes back for some reason, and picks up the thread. When he tries taking the needle, Peter jerks away, shaking his head. “No—no, I’ve _got_ it—I’ve got it—you don’t even know how.”

Flash got chewed out for at least another ten minutes after he made his entrance. If he couldn’t pull it together before now, he definitely doesn’t _“got it,”_ as he insists.

He looks him in the eye. “I took home ec, man. Let me help,” he says as gently as he can manage.

Peter looks wrecked, and his chin dips in a wobbly nod.

“Do that thing I taught you,” he adds, licking the end of the thread to get it to stick together and fit through the eye of the needle. “You have to calm down, or you’re not going to be able to do stitches.”

He hears a rattling breath cycle through Peter’s chest. “How does it start again?”

Flash holds the two ends of the thread together, making sure they’re even. “Five things you can see,” he prompts, and though it takes a few tries to get the string knotted properly, Peter’s muttering eventually steadies his hands, which take the fruit of Flash’s labors delicately despite the tears still seeping down his cheeks. He’s stripped again, like before, and while Flash could see the blood dripping down his arm while he was working with the needle, he hadn’t seen the extent of the wound, which looks like—

“Dude, did you get _shot?”_

Peter nods, not exactly calm, but better than he was as he meticulously plants a row of stitches across the bullethole.

“There was an attack on a bank across town. Hostages. Some of the guys managed to give SWAT or whoever the slip, and I had to chase them down. They got me good before I could web them up.”

“That why you never came back to class?”

Another nod. He’s nearly halfway there, and Flash gets up to go get a washcloth. He’s bleeding all over the rug again, but it’s not like his dad will miss the money it takes to replace it. When he comes back, Peter’s finished up, and he takes the cloth gently, pressing his lips together against the pain as he cleans around the wound.

Flash realizes with a start that he should get the painkillers again, but now that he thinks of it, Peter didn’t take any the last time.

“Do you want Advil again?” he asks, checking.

Peter shrugs, and there’s scarlet slick on the needle as he sets it in his palm. “Nah. Doesn’t work,” he croaks. 

“That sucks,” Flash replies limply.

“Yeah.”

The word sounds even weaker than Flash’s reaction. His tears haven’t stopped, and Flash somehow doubts they’re a result of the pain. He hates himself for even asking, but Peter has a knack for making him do things he really doesn’t want to fucking do. 

“Wanna’ talk about it?” he says, like an idiot.

And Peter’s response throws him straight into the deep end.

“I watched someone die today, and I couldn’t stop it.”

Scratch that, it throws him into the deep end and holds him down so he can’t come up for air.

“Oh.” 

That’s not nearly enough to cover the gravity of what’s been said, but Flash doesn’t know how to help with that. He got him what he needed to stitch himself back together, he helped clean him up, but emotions? He’s never been good with those, but the thing is, Peter keeps talking.

“It was at the bank. They waited a long time, tried to negotiate, and the cops told me to leave, but I couldn’t just do _nothing_ , so I kept watch on a building close by. And then when they broke for it, someone got shot. And I held them. And they begged me to help, and I tried to bring them to the ambulance, but they just—they—” He makes a helpless motion with his hands, and an ugly sound breaks free from his mouth.

“You couldn’t have stopped it.”

The words are carved from marble, immovable. They’re gritty on Flash’s tongue, but he knows without a shadow of a doubt that they’re true, even if he can’t say where the confidence to speak them comes from.

Peter looks up from where he’s staring at his hands, shaking his head a touch frantically. “No, no—I have this warning system. I could _feel_ that something was about to happen, and I swung down, but I wasn’t fast enough. I let them get shot. It’s _my fault.”_

And that’s where Flash’s therapy rears its ferocious head. He can still remember the face of the lady his dad sent him to when he told her the same thing, browned and thin, her eyes dark and thunderous, lightning about to strike, and the finger she jabbed at him, seemingly uncaring that he was seven and sobbing in her office.

“It is _never_ the victim’s fault,” he says, repeating her verbatim with the same steel she had in her voice.

He’s got issues still, sure, but he’ll never forget how the words grounded him in his chair, the clouds clearing above his head as someone laid out what his dad was too worried about saving face to confront directly.

“I wasn’t the victim, Flash. I’m still alive,” he murmurs, but Flash is pissed Peter even has a guilt-complex big enough for this to a problem. It didn’t look good on him when he was trying to figure out why his mom used to go into the bathroom for a long time and hit him when she came out, and it doesn’t look good on Peter now.

“Well, you’re not the one who shot them, are you?” he snaps. “There are some really shitty people in the world, Parker, and sometimes, shitty people just do shitty stuff. That’s not on you. You did your best.”

“But—”

“If you argue with me on this one, I know a lady who’s, like, five feet tall and will literally put your ass in a grave.”

Peter blinks bemusedly at him, his brows knitting.

“Therapy is pretty useful, dude.”

Peter stares, but Flash doesn’t back down, not until he sags back against the wall, shifting his eyes to look out the window at something Flash can’t see.

Flash turns away, going to find more clothes he ordered too big—on accident, okay, on _accident_ —and when he hands them to Peter, he makes an attempt to act like things are normal. “Put some clothes on, loser,” he says, but there’s no bite to it, not like before.

It’s hard to not like someone for flaking all the time when they’re doing it to rack up some trauma of their own.

“Shut up, man,” Peter replies, and Flash pretends it’s totally chill to have a guy fold his superhero suit like fresh laundry ten feet away from him, settling on his bed again. He—shocker—has physics again, and he picks up his pencil. 

He’s barely halfway through a problem when Peter clears his throat, standing at the foot of his bed and scratching awkwardly at the base of his neck. “I could help you with that. If you want.”

Flash can imagine what his dad would say— _“You’re smart—you don’t need help, Eugene.”_ —but his dad’s off talking to some jerk rich enough to hire him, and this unit is kicking his ass.

Besides, if he says no, Peter might leave and do something stupid again. It’s a good deed on his part, really, and he shrugs. “If you have the time,” he says, and though he would never tell him as much, Peter explains things surprisingly well. 

It’s getting late by the time Peter mentions going home, and, well, it’s not like he can let him swing back across the city when he’s taken a bullet earlier in the day.

Flash grabs the keys to one of his dad’s less expensive cars, ignoring Peter’s hesitance.

“Uh—are you sure your dad won’t be mad?”

“He won’t notice I’m gone,” Flash assures him and makes sure he’s facing the wrong way to see how Peter might react to that one.

They’re a few minutes from his apartment when Flash begs the question that’s been needling him since Peter first showed up at his house to bleed over the interior design. “Why do you come to my place? Wouldn’t your apartment be easier?”

Peter makes a noncommittal noise, just barely audible above the indie stuff Flash has playing, something his friends from school, who are kind of the worst, would probably say something derogatory about. “I don’t like to freak my aunt out. She knows about the whole superhero thing, but I try to keep her from finding out about the worst of it—save us both the trouble. And Mr. Stark—” He sighs and shakes his head, actually managing to sound _irritated_ with _Iron Man_ , who Flash has begrudgingly accepted he probably knows. “He’s, like, a total helicopter parent, but the AI in my suit won’t call him if I can prove I’m getting help, which, if I go to your house, I technically am.”

Tony Stark always on your case—must be nice, but the thought is weird. Like, _super_ weird.

“Dude, what even is your life?”

“Right?”

It’s not funny, not really, but sitting at a red light, they both let out what can, at best, be called giggles. And then, feeding off each other, it grows into laughter, and then, it’s gut-busting, side-splitting guffaws, a touch hysterical but present all the same.

“Iron Man—Iron _fucking_ Man, is a helicopter parent?”

“I _know_.”

“Hey, Parker,” he manages, shaking with the effort to make it through the joke. “You know the thing that powers the suits?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you say he’s _react_ ive?”

That’s arguably even less funny than what got them going in the first place, but they both lose it even more until Flash is struggling to keep his eyes on the road and Peter is bent nearly double, putting a hand on the dash for support. It’s nice, more genuine than anything Flash has done with the people he usually hangs out with in months, and Flash drops Peter off at his building smiling.

The next day, Peter doesn’t even look at him funny when he tells his normal lunch group he has a project he has to work on with him and plops down at his table with Ned and MJ, and Flash’s normally semi-tortuous routine feels a little better.

Two weekends later, Flash goes to a party out in the suburbs, and he thinks he’s going to puke.

One of the upperclassmen he used to hang with—Cory, who’s a douche in the first place—is hosting, and nobody told Flash that he invited some friends in college.

Flash doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke—not weed, cigs, anything—but as the night deepens, the college guys are flashing little bags of white powder in the corner. They haven’t even tried to offer him any, but Flash is _gone_ , down the front steps and a few blocks over before he can register what’s happened. He’s pretty sure he left his wallet, but it’s fine, he’ll cancel his cards, anything to make sure he doesn’t have to see that anymore.

The world is spinning, and he doesn’t know when he gets his phone out, much less what prompts him to scroll to Peter’s contact.

(He has Peter Parker’s number in his phone now, isn’t that wild?)

It’s one in the morning on a Saturday night, he might not even be awake, but lo and behold, he picks up, clear as a bell.

“Hey, man. What’s up?”

In the background, there are noises Flash can’t decipher, vague bangs and maybe even something that sounds like scolding, but none of it matters. Peter’s voice floods him with relief, and isn’t that a fucking trip.

“I—I was at a party,” he mumbles, pacing the sidewalk. He probably shouldn’t be out alone this late at night, but the suburbs aren’t too bad of a place to be, all things considered. His own safety doesn’t matter, anyway—he wouldn’t go back to the party for anything.

“O- _kay_?” Peter drawls, and faintly, Flash hears him say something to someone else— _“I’m talking to a friend!_ ”

Is that what they are? Are they friends now? It might be nice to hear some other time, but Flash can’t catch his breath, can’t stop thinking about the white lines he used to see on the bathroom counter in his parents’ bedroom, the ones he curiously tried to touch only to have his hands _smacked_ away with a hissed threat.

“Are you good?” Peter asks, likely prompted by his harsh, shallow breaths on his end of the line.

Flash hasn’t felt like this in years, not since his dad tried to get the whole family together to take pictures for Christmas cards the same year his mom went to rehab and he nearly fainted in terror— _no, he’s not good._

Peter already knows some of it, Flash reasons. He can tell him this much about what’s wrong.

“Cory—you know, that one senior, Cory—had some guys from NYU come over, and—and—holy _shit,_ I can’t _breathe_ —they had coke.”

“ _What?_ Dude, did you do some?”

Muffled, faint from Peter’s end of things— _“Pete, what’s going on?”_

 _“No!”_ Flash explodes, suddenly furious. How dare he accuse him of that? He doesn’t do _anything_ that might leave him like her, in that same blind, thoughtless rage that he could never run far enough from. “Fuck you, no, I don’t do drugs. I’m—I’m not there anymore. Where—can you—”

He can’t catch his breath, he doesn’t even know what he wants to ask, but Peter reads between the lines.

“Do you need a ride?”

Flash feels hot, panicked tears swell, and his voice comes out in a croak. “Please,” he asks. “I’ll send you my location.”

And he does just that, hanging up and ignoring all the calls that come after that as he sits on the curb and puts his head in his knees until he hears the purr of an engine. He looks up to see an Audi he’s pretty sure isn’t supposed to be released until next year roll up in front of him.

The doors on it open, and Peter is at his side almost immediately, earnest and concerned in a way nobody ever was for him until Spider-Man crash-landed in his bedroom.

“Flash?” he asks, crouching down. “Hey, Flash, it’s me—Peter.”

“I know who you are,” he mumbles, but it’s like he’s watching the exchange from somewhere outside of himself.

Peter cracks a smile, but Flash sees his eyes dart over his shoulder to the other shape approaching. It stands off to the side, waiting, and he draws away a little bit, thinking of how hard he’d tried to behave, hoping it would calm her down, how it never worked.

“Alright, cool—cool,” Peter mutters. “Um—do you want to get in the car? Mr. Stark and I came to get you, and we can take you back to your house—”

“Don’t.”

It’s the same house from when his mom still lived with them, and yeah, his dad got his room redecorated when he kept waking up screaming, but sometimes when he gets bad—when he gets like this—he can see the phantom of her that exists in his memories, crazed and so _mad_ over nothing, wandering the halls, looking for something to take her newfound strength out on.

“Don’t take you back home?”

His head dips in a sharp nod, and somehow, he remembers Peter’s trepidation a few weeks previous. “My dad won’t notice,” he assures him, just in case, and in the corner of his eye, he sees the shape wince.

His mom never flinched, which means that can’t be her or anyone like her. Knowing that, he finally, excruciatingly, looks at the shape directly and finds Tony Stark standing a few feet away.

He feels about three years old when he realizes that there’s a certain comfort in knowing he has not one but _two_ superheroes watching his back.

His attention is briefly redirected to Peter when he talks again. “Would the Compound work? May’s at some medical conference this weekend, so my place is off-limits.”

The Compound—the _Avengers_ Compound, Flash processes belatedly.

(No one is going to be able to hurt him there.)

“Sounds great,” he replies, and somehow, someway, he is loaded into the car, which drives smoother than any of his dad’s even though they’re going liberally above the speed limit the whole way there.

He remembers walking to a room, remembers briefly thinking that none of this could be real, and then he wakes up the next morning in the softest bed he’s ever been in.

He blinks a few times, trying to remember where he is, and it comes to him with a start, utterly unbelievable. Then, a voice comes out of the ceiling.

Flash doesn’t exactly know what he’s supposed to say to the disembodied voice who knows his name, but they get along well enough, and after a shower and a change of clothes someone left on his bed, there’s a knock on the door.

Flash stiffens. He knew it had to be coming—he wouldn’t just leave the guy he saw have a mental breakdown the night previous to his own devices either—but it’s still jarring.

The voice, who has introduced herself by now as FRIDAY, offers some guidance.

“It appears Peter would like to enter, Mr. Thompson,” she informs him, quieter than usual, though Flash knows by now that Peter’s freaky spider senses will have heard anyway.

“You can come in,” he calls, and the door swings open to very tentatively reveal Peter.

“Hey,” he greets him, feeling somehow bare in the space provided to him. All he has that belongs to him is his phone and his clothes from last night, and it’s uncomfortable to realize how out of his element he is.

“Hey,” Peter replies, stepping inside. “How are you?”

Things haven’t been this tense between them in a while, and there’s a moment where Flash thinks that he’s gone and messed it all up like he always does, like his dad always yells at him about. Then, Flash thinks about where he is and the fact that Peter came to pick him up at one in the morning because he was freaking the fuck out and tells himself to stop being stupid and fix things.

Peter isn’t going to disappear because of one bad night. That’s not who he is, not what they—he realizes, somewhat to his surprise—are.

“Better,” he tells him, which isn’t a lie. “The ceiling lady was kinda freaky though.”

Peter snorts. “Yeah, she has that effect,” he admits, and then his face grows somber. “So, about last night—”

“Thanks.”

“Oh—you know, just doing you a favor. Figured you deserved it after throwing out a couple rugs worth, like, more than my rent.”

Except it’s not _just_ a favor, and they both know it. Flash refuses to pretend otherwise, not when the world landed on his shoulders and Peter took the time to lift it so he didn’t have to.

“You don’t have to play it off. That was a cool thing to do, and I’m—um—sorry I shouted at you.” He’s pretty sure he yelled at him, anyway, but his memory isn’t the clearest its ever been. “And I never apologized for being a douche to you before I caught that something was up, so I’m sorry for that too. You’re—” Flash looks down, the sincerity lopsided in his mouth. “You’re a really good friend.”

They stare at each other, and it strikes Flash that Peter, despite his worn jeans, the hole in his shirt, looks like he belongs in the space much more than Flash does.

“I’m glad I could help,” he says, natural as anything.

It took Flash back when he first ripped his mask off, but it seems plain now that Peter’s Spider-Man. And if he’s Spider-Man, if he bothered to show up when he called—

“My mom used to do coke when I was a kid,” he tells him.

She also had a tendency to mix that with copious amounts of alcohol, but he’s taking the whole vulnerability thing one step at a time. He’s never said that to anyone, not even his therapist, who was given the rundown of his situation before Flash put a foot in the door. He never even told his dad, who _experienced_ rather than _discovered_ that things had gone really, really wrong in their house.

His dad doesn’t pay much attention to anything outside of his job and Flash’s grades, but even he couldn’t miss the sight of her shrieking like a banshee and throwing anything she could her hands on one day when he got off early from work.

Flash doesn’t offer him anything else, none of the details he still struggles to confront. He doesn’t need to for him to understand the depth of what he’s relaying.

Peter looks at him, and though something softens in the corners of his mouth, he doesn’t back down, doesn’t flinch away or look at him with pity like that first night with the stab wound. He nods, and somehow, Flash gets the sense that he’s simply being reevaluated.

“I’m sorry,” Peter replies at last.

Flash shrugs. “Not your fault. Just thought you should know why I flipped shit.”

“You didn’t—”

Flash raises a brow, another mannerism he’s picked up from his dad that is shockingly effective.

“Alright, you did. A little bit,” Peter acquiesces with a sympathetic shift of his shoulders. “It happens though, seriously. I mean, come on, the janitor’s closet?”

Flash barks something that resembles a laugh, but it’s a touch too hoarse. “I thought I was gonna’ puke,” he confesses. Then, he groans. _“Dude,_ I cannot believe I met Tony Stark while I was having a panic attack.”

“If it makes you feel better, I webbed his hand to a doorknob, like, five minutes after meeting him.”

“You _what?”_

“I webbed his hand to a doorkn—”

Flash huffs, shaking his head in disbelief. “I heard you, dumbass.”

“Well, if you’re going to be rude, I’m not going to introduce you.”

Flash thinks his eyes are going to fall out of his head and starts stumbling over half-baked apologies. The ceiling voice was a solid indication that last night happened, but it’s still kind of unreal that he’s in the fucking _Avengers Compound._

He’s asked before, but seriously, what even is Peter’s life?

Peter laughs. “Nah, nah, I’m joking,” he assures him, and knocks their shoulders together as he walks past him in a motion that feels way too casual to have come from Peter Parker, someone Flash would’ve sworn his hatred for up and down a few months ago. “He said he wanted to meet you, actually,” he drops, walking into the hall like he hasn’t said anything at all.

Flash blinks once, twice. Then—

 _“What?”_ he can’t stop himself from yelling.

Flash steps out the door to chase after him and, for once, runs into a place that only has people he wants to see in it.

**Author's Note:**

> Whew, that was an _adventure_. I’ve had this fic started since shortly after FFH, inspired by [this](https://the-reverse-mermaid.tumblr.com/post/186057203089/hang-on-was-anyone-else-hurt-in-their-heart-when) tumblr post and it’s tags and my love for its op, [the-reverse-mermaid on tumblr/Bean_reads_fanfic on ao3](https://the-reverse-mermaid.tumblr.com), and I recently had a rough day and distracted myself from things by adding approximately 6k onto what I already had. I don’t know if this is technically canon compliant with what’s been established about Flash, but I also don’t care, lmao. Things spiraled a bit out of control here, but this fic was an interesting chance for me to explore topics I haven’t breached before. That being said, I recognize that this fic deals with sensitive subjects, and while I tried to tag this fic to the best of my ability, _please_ let me know if there is anything I need to add so that readers know what they are getting into. I want to give everyone a healthy and enjoyable fic-reading experience : )
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)


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